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Given its first ever performance at Glyndebourne in 1946, Benjamin Britten created this opera with the poet Ronald Duncan, who wrote about their collaboration: ‘Britten and I worked at the same desk. We first discussed the shape of the whole drama and then spent several days working over this in order to reduce it to its essential simplicity. We kept our work fluid – even after it had gone to the printer and engraver, much to their dismay.’

The result of this close collaboration is an extraordinary and tightly focussed treatment of a legend which has acquired numerous layers in painting, poetry and drama. Lucretia is raped by the tyrant Tarquinius Superbus, ruler of Rome, and elects to kill herself rather than live with the shame. The action of the opera is commented on throughout by a Male and Female Chorus who occupy another dimension, at times narrating the story and at times voicing the thoughts of the different characters.

The central role of Lucretia is one which engages the talents of a singing actress to the utmost and one with which director Fiona Shaw will empathise keenly, drawing on her own experiences as both a performer and a director.

It was in describing this work that Britten coined the term ‘chamber opera’, creating a work of distilled power and refinement with a cast of eight and an orchestra of 12 players and piano.

For full list of venues and dates, see here: http://glyndebourne.com/production/rape-of-lucretia-tour-2013

The time of beginning based on Ovid, the time of the first men, the time of civilizations: Raphaël Cendo has arranged his epic for choir, ensemble, and electronics in three large chapters, with, by way of an epilogue, uses this fragment of Heraclitus: If one does not hope, one will not find the unhoped-for, since there is no trail leading to it and no path. Registre, according to the composer, designates the book of memories, "memory of lights that transmitted a common, far away, past, milestones of our Humanity".

This event celebrates The Royal Philharmonic Society Bicentenary 1813-2013.

Principal Guest Conductor Markus Stenz has forged a strong relationship with the Hallé Choir and here directs one of the great masterpieces of the choral repertoire, Brahms’s German Requiem. Its title aside, the work has an appeal that transcends both national boundaries and religious beliefs (Brahms even considered naming it a ‘Human Requiem’) and it remains a deeply moving experience for audiences everywhere. While its musical language is unmistakably that of Brahms, it also looks back to Bach and to the composers of the Renaissance. Brahms’s progression from suffering to eventual consolation is thus both dramatically and musically fascinating. Wolfgang Rihm is a composer who never fails to confound and enthral. The concert opens with his Tribute (Über die Linie VIII), an homage to Benjamin Britten commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society and given its world premiere by Sir Mark and the Hallé at the 2013 Aldeburgh Festival.

British composer Michael Nyman returns to Birmingham in an intimate performance at Town Hall, playing solo piano music from films that he has collaborated on with directors including Peter Greenaway, Jane Campion and Neil Jordan.

Accompanied by a selection of films that Nyman personally recorded whilst on his travels, the evening provides a fascinating insight into the visual and musical world.

One of the music events of the year Frank Zappa's legendary 1971 work 200 Motels is performed live in concert for the first ever time in the UK.

This colossal piece, one of the most ambitious that Zappa ever wrote, is performed by the full forces of the BBC Concert Orchestra, Southbank Sinfonia, London Voices and a large cast of rock musicians, singers and actors.

Banned from live performance at the time of its composition, and a cult classic on film and on record ever since, 200 Motels can finally be heard on stage in its full glory.

Simon Holt's The Yellow Wallpaper tells the story of feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gillman. Experience the story of this woman's obsession with her enclosed surroundings. Accompanied by two 1930s masterpieces: Franz Schmidt's Fourth Symphony and Berg's Violin Concerto. Composed with furious intensity and pre-emptive of Berg's own untimely death, the Concerto is best known as his own requiem.

‘Man is an abyss – you feel giddy when you look into it.’ So declares Wozzeck in Alban Berg’s harrowing psychological drama. The title character is a disturbed man who is used for experimentation, taunted for his poverty and inarticulacy, and finally, in despair, driven to murder the only person he loves. The opera is based on the incomplete play Woyzeck by Georg Büchner. It was given its premiere in 1925 in Berlin and rapidly became extremely successful.

Berg’s music is both rapturous and terrifying. The score is richly varied, from the depiction of Wozzeck’s terrifying visions to Marie’s exquisitely gentle lullaby to her son, to the black comedy of the Doctor and the Captain’s music. Berg also draws heavily on folk song, giving a vivid picture of the working-class community in which the characters live. A white-tiled laboratory provides the claustrophobic setting for Keith Warner’s uncompromising staging. The production marked Warner’s directorial debut at Covent Garden and received an Olivier Award in 2003 for Best New Opera Production.

The Tudors leave the operatic stage to dominate the concert hall with two works inspired by the period. The concert also pays tribute to Benjamin Britten in his centenary year as well as his friendship with Dmitri Shostakovich. - See more at: http://www.wno.org.uk/tudorsconcert#sthash.7NOcdGIj.dpuf

Students come from all corners of the world to study with him at the Guildhall School of Music; his list of forthcoming performances and commissions, meanwhile, underlines the international profile and significance of his work.
Julian Anderson’s strikingly inventive music is the latest focus of a Wigmore Hall Composer Day, presented complete with a world première, a talk from the composer himself and performances by, among others, Cédric Tiberghien, the Aurora Orchestra, Adam Walker and Claire Booth.

This programme of works for organ and electronics, including three new commissions by Martin Iddon, Stuart Russell and Huw Morgan, explore the breadth of the sonic and performance possibilities for the combination of organ and electronics as both an extended and a composite instrument, showcasing unexpected and exciting new sounds and approaches.

An unmissable concert! It has been a while since the SCO last premiered a work from its old friend, the Master of the Queen’s Music. With Knussen directing (he is a passionate devotee) this will be special. No less remarkable is the opportunity to hear Serkin play the Bartók. A wonderful concerto with Hungarian folk influences vying with Wagner’s Tristan, hints of jazz and an evocation of night music in what amounts to a passionate and joy-filled love song to his wife. Stravinsky closes the evening powerfully and grandly with his symphony.

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies on his new work for the Orchestra:
"In the late ‘eighties, as composer in residence to the SCO, I was commissioned to write my ten Strathclyde Concertos for the Orchestra. This involved writing for and working with the leaders of each section, and conducting performances of these works not only in Scotland, but also in Europe and America.

It is a great privilege, with this history, to be invited to write a work for the SCO’s fortieth birthday, as a vote of thanks for a wonderful musical experience with them in the past, and also as a vote of confidence in their glorious future."

Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem interweaves the poetry of Wilfred Owen with the words of the Requiem Mass in a deeply moving and powerful work. Written for the consecration of Coventry Cathedral after its destruction in the Second World War, this great work remains as relevant today as ever. Semyon Bychkov conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Chorus and superb soloists in a performance of the work in Britten’s 100th anniversary year, on Remembrance Sunday and in an iconic building whose association with remembrance goes back nearly a century.

British master Robin Holloway’s In China, written in 2012, receives its UK premiere at Maida Vale Studios conducted by Garry Walker. In September 2011, Holloway was invited to explore China with four other composers, to be inspired and write a new orchestral piece embodying his responses to the sensory and cultural experiences there. Holloway particularly responded to the extraordinary landscapes he witnessed on this journey and describes his new work as ‘extremely direct’, to reflect the vastness of Chinese accomplishments such as the skyscrapers in Beijing, the Great Wall and the Terracotta Warriors Army. He also took inspiration from the ethnic music and the rhythmic quality of the sound of the Chinese language he heard.

Emily Howard’s Solar precedes this; a work which encapsulates the sun. Howard describes the inspiration taken from this object of devotion, with its strong solar magnetic field, reflected in her music by bursting energy on the surface, but always with a slow-burning and intense core.

This concert also features exciting new compositions by Sound and Music Embedded composers Tom Coult, Aaron Holloway-Nahum and Benjamin Oliver, who continue their residency with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

This concert will be recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Hear and Now.

New Dots presents an informal evening of world premieres performed by London based new music specialists, the Octandre Ensemble. Performing six newly commissioned musical works by some of the best emerging composition talent in the country, the concert will also feature talks from the composers about their work, giving the audience a unique insight into their creative process, and the collaboration between performer and composer

“My subject is war, and the pity of war.” Benjamin Britten took sacred words and the poetry of the First World War, and combined them into a masterpiece that echoes down the decades: bold, poetic, and devastatingly emotional. One week before Britten’s hundredth birthday, Peter Oundjian, three great soloists, and our two superb choruses come together in this unique commemorative performance of the War Requiem.

Based on the 'Strange Loop' paradigm as described by Douglas Hofstadter in his book Gödel Escher Bach. Harry Whalley's 'Entangled Music' is a major work for large chamber ensemble with this ideas at its core.

“How to describe it? An astonishing work of art that has become a cult wherever it is played. One of the first great masterpieces of the C21st.”
Sir Simon Rattle

Premiered in 2000 and now receiving its much-awaited UK premiere performance at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Haas’ in vain is an extraordinary work of contradictions and juxtapositions, exploring a heightened sensory world where darkness and light coincide. Written in protest to the rise of the far-right Freedom Party in the 1999 Austrian elections, in vain hints at a frightening world where dark, unnatural forces are at work. As familiar harmonies meet microtonal systems, Haas evokes an otherworldly realm that oscillates between the past and the present, between clarity and dystopia. Performed partly in complete darkness, in vain transforms the concert hall into a mysterious new landscape, where you must trust your ears and relinquish your sight.

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), the nation’s premier orchestra dedicated exclusively to commissioning, performing, and recording new orchestral music, presents a one-night only concert performance of Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts (1928). An abstruse modernist opera sans plot or formal structure, Four Saints is the perfect way for the unflagging BMOP orchestra to kick-start the new season.

WHAT: NEA JAZZ MASTER CHICO HAMILTON @ DROM
In yet another strong showing by this venerable drummer, 92 year-old percussionist and band leader Foreststorn “Chico” Hamilton celebrates his working life in a trio of concerts – EUPHORIC: Celebrating the Life & Music of Chico Hamilton. Known for fashioning finely textured sounds with small ensembles, Chico leads his long-time working group Euphoria featuring Nick Demopoulos (guitar), Paul Ramsey (bass), Evan Schwam (flute + reeds), Mayu Saeki (flute), and Jeremy Carlstedt (drums + percussion) as well as special featured guests TBA. Program includes some new original material as well as works off of Chico’s latest vivacious albums: Revelation and Euphoric (Joyous Shout!). Saluted by the Kennedy Center as a "Living Jazz Legend", and appointed to the President’s Council on the Arts, this NEA Jazz Master is considered one of the most important living jazz artists and composers. According to Jazz Improv NY, “he sounds more creative and artistic than ever.”

In honor of the 92 year-old percussionist and band leader, his long-time working group Euphoria continues his legacy with a monthly concert series at DROM starting Sunday, November 17th with special featured guests TBA.

Known for fashioning finely textured sounds with small ensembles, the program includes some new original material off of Chico’s forthcoming album (Release Date 2014) as well as works off of Chico’s latest vivacious albums: Revelation and Euphoric (Joyous Shout!).

Saluted by the Kennedy Center as a "Living Jazz Legend", and appointed to the President’s Council on the Arts, this NEA Jazz Master is considered one of the most important living jazz artists and composers. According to Jazz Improv NY, “he sounds more creative and artistic than ever.”

In this special concert performance and recording for BBC Radio 3, members of the BBC SSO join forces with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland's Junior Conservatoire to perform one of Britten's most colourful and engaging works, Noye's Fludde. Offering the audience the chance to join in with several congregational hymns, Britten's telling of Noah and the Ark is a celebration of music-making by young people, amateurs and professionals. Two of the UK's finest young professional singers, Jennifer Johnston and Leigh Melrose play the leading roles and the Voice of God is portrayed by the celebrated Scottish actress, Siobhan Redmond.

The aerial acrobatics of two eagles, soaring and tumbling in the air, inspired Ned Rorem’s Eagles, and its bright, athletic energy also permeates David Diamond’s Rounds. John Adams’ clarinet concerto, Gnarly Buttons, is an affectionate tribute to his clarinettist father. Hear it next to Roy Harris’ richly humanistic Ninth Symphony.

Wednesday, November 20, 2013 at SATYAGRAHAEnglish National OperaLondon Coliseum United Kingdom

ENO

A huge success at its London premiere in 2007 and at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, the following year, Philip Glass's operatic masterpiece returns to ENO. Satyagraha is a mesmerising musical meditation on Mahatma Gandhi's early years in South Africa and his spiritual progress towards the concept of nonviolent protest.

Performances: 20th Nov-8th Dec

One of the most visually spectacular productions of recent decades, Satyagraha is instilled with theatrical flair by the award-winning director designer partnership of Improbable's Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch.

Returning to the roles they created in 2007 and reprised in 2009 are Alan Oke as Gandhi and Janis Kelly as Mrs Naidoo. Satyagraha is conducted by Stuart Stratford.

A collaboration with Improbable. Co-produced by ENO and the Metropolitan Opera, New York

The dominant figure in British musical life for a large part of the twentieth century, Benjamin Britten was one of the world's most prolific composers. Although in many ways an outsider figure, his extraordinary fluency and versatility meant that his distinctive voice was heard in opera houses, concert halls, theatres, cathedrals and schools, as well as on radio and in film.

This concert marks Britten's centenary with an exploration of his unique soundworld, with two of his best-loved operas and one of his most original and compelling orchestral works, the Sinfonia da Requiem.

The BBC Philharmonic is joined by broadcaster Stephen Johnson for this accessible guide to Britten's music, including live orchestral extracts, before a complete performance of all three works.